Birds A Major Peril To India`s Planes

September 22, 1985|By Mark Fineman, Special to The Tribune.

NEW DELHI — Just after dawn one day earlier this month, a Rome-bound Air-India Boeing 747 suddenly slammed back onto the runway during takeoff, skidded off the tarmac and blew out 14 of its 16 tires, leaving 313 passengers and crew members panic-stricken but alive.

The problem: A vulture had been sucked into engine No. 1.

Birds are also India`s No. 1 aviation hazard. In the last decade, more than 750 Indian passenger jets have been crippled by birds either in the sky or during takeoffs and landings at Indian airports.

The cost of repairing the damage has been $15 million to $20 million a year, according to the chief controller of research and development in the Indian Defense Ministry. And in the last two years the government has spent millions more to finance ``bird control units`` at most of the nation`s 65 civilian airports.

The only deaths reported so far have been pilots in the Indian Air Force, which said more than 800 of its fighter jets and trainers have struck birds since 1972.

The birds--mostly vultures but sometimes buzzards and kites (giant carnivorous hawks)--are drawn to airport areas by the heaps of rotting garbage and animal carcasses in the shanty slums that surround many airfields in India. Among the worst is New Delhi`s Palam International Airport, where five sprawling mud-hut villages abut the runways. But Santa Cruz Airport in Bombay, adjacent to two illegal slaughterhouses, isn`t much better.

In recent years, the government has declared war on what many have dubbed ``the winged menace.`` And war it is.

Every day, armed police patrols fire rifles and lob firecrackers into flocks of birds gathered near the runways or in transit from one slum colony to another.

Airport authorities in New Delhi have purchased two large tanker trucks that twice a day saturate the length and breadth of the airport with chemicals capable of incapacitating or killing the birds.

Additional teams are sent out early each morning and late at night to scrape dead insects off the runway landing lights. The bugs, officials say, attract the birds.

Still another team scours the land around the airport for dead snakes and jackals that also might draw the birds.

The battle plan was drawn up after a two-day meeting of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and the Aeronautical Research and Development Board.

The meeting also led to legislation that banned slaughterhouses, tanneries, open-air hotels and restaurants within 10 miles of airfields and established minimum standards for garbage disposal in the villages and slums. ``But the hardest part is getting compliance,`` said an official of the International Airport Authority of India. ``We can`t patrol these slums all the time. And, politically, we just can`t go in and bulldoze the entire slum.``

Like the birds, thousands of rural villagers have flocked to the slums around the bustling Palam Airport here because it offered a more reliable livelihood. Most of the shanty dwellers are airport porters, sweepers, maintenance men and cargo handlers.

``Where would we go?`` said a baggage handler who lives in the airport slums. ``Delhi is already too crowded. The airport needs our labor. So we must live here.``

Nonetheless, the government`s bird battle is succeeding, at least at Palam Airport. In 1983, the year the program began, only 36 passenger jets were hit by birds. Last year, the number was reduced to just six. And airport authorities claim the bird ingested by Air-India Flight 125`s No. 1 engine Sept. 11 was the first serious incident in the capital this year.

``But one is all it takes,`` the airport authority official said. ``If not for quick thinking on the pilot`s part, we could have had a real disaster. And think of it, all because of one stupid little bird.``